Some of that stuff was just plain wrong but was done for dramatics and story line. The whole idea that the Hubble and ISS and the Chinese space station would be anywhere near each other much less line of site was ridiculous. Whether they could have written an equally dramatic story without committing too such flawed science I don;t know. For the average viewer it probably did not matter but for fans of the space program it was a glaring flaw.
One thing Tyson failed to point out was a big physics error which played a role in another dramatic point of the film. When Bullocks character is holding on to Clooney’s character and the ropes are starting to give way he cuts himself lose to save her. They get so much of the other physics right and then they screwed this up. Clooney is not hanging from a cliff pulling down on Bullock. They are both in orbit. Once his momentum was stopped ( and it was) his body would not be exerting any more force on Bullock or the ropes. They would just be floating. In real ife there would have been no need to cut himself away from her. Sometimes even in a movie that is done well over all they violate the laws of physics for dramatic effect.
SciFi is always about suspending disbelief and it usually works as long as the things they do in the movies don’t violate real world physical laws too much but it also depends on the viewer. Someone who knows more is going to notice more. This movie was designed for a mass audience not a bunch of astrogeeks. Even so they got a heck of a lot of stuff right and did a much better job than most scifi directors do.
Just for fun to point out a couple of other mistakes. In the movie the crossed paths with the debris field every 90 minutes. They came up with this time interval because it takes about 90 minutes to obit the earth at that altitude. The problem is that the debris field was traveling in the opposite direction in the movie which means they would have crossed paths every 45 minutes. I don’t know why they didn’t just make the debris field come in perpendicular to their orbit since it would have then been every 90 minutes and it would have been more consistent with real satellite orbits and wouldn’t have changed the story in any way. Also since they had a combined relative speed of 35,000 mph the way it was shown in the movies you wouldn’t have even seen the stuff coming at you because it would have been moving almost 50 times as fast as a bullet and the impact would probably have been far more catastrophic then it was in the movie.
